Internet stumped by ‘UFO’ footage

CAN you identify this ‘UFO’? A curious video captured by a drone enthusiast and uploaded to YouTube has set the internet abuzz.

The four-second clip, filmed from 80 metres above California’s Silicon Valley, appears to show a small white object streaking across the screen at an impossibly fast speed.

The video, ‘UFO caught in 4K with drone’, uploaded by a user going by the handle ‘Darmino’, has sparked furious discussion on internet forums.

“I have no idea what this is, maybe a bug, hummingbird, reflection or alien space craft! The only thing I know for sure is that I did nothing that would cause this,” Darmino wrote on the forum for the drone’s manufacturer, DJI.

“You can analyse it better if you download the video in 4K and go frame by frame. Any other ideas of what it might be?”

Theories range from an insect or bird, to a stray bullet (“Somebody shot at your drone and missed,” wrote one user), to a secret military plane. Of course, it could just be a hoax. Or a marketing stunt.

As one user on Reddit commented: “I am reminded of what someone said once about the two types of sasquatch videos that exist. Up close and blurry or far away and HD. When I saw 4K in the title I knew before I clicked that it would be far away. In this case very far away and extremely fast.”

Assuming the object isn’t purely CGI, it definitely appears to be going at a fair speed. One YouTube user estimated the distance travelled as around one mile every one to two seconds.

That would give it a speed of around 2890 km/h, roughly 2.4 times the speed of sound. The airspeed record is still held by the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird spy plane with 3,529.6 km/h.

Earlier this year, UFO enthusiast John Greenewald, who spent nearly two decades filing Freedom of Information requests to compile an extensive online archive of UFO case files, made the fabled Project Blue Book available on his website The Black Vault.